Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

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30 April 2008

Herman Slater was raised by Jewish parents in New York. He studied business administration at New York University, liberal arts atHunterCollege, traffic management at the Traffic Management Institute in New York, and also at the US Navy Personnel School in Bainbridge, Maryland. From 1958-69 he worked in management, traffic control and insurance claims.

In 1969 he was crippled with tuberculosis of the bone and in convalescence for three years. He experimented with psychic sciences and managed to levitate while wearing a 300 lb body cast.

After hospital he joined a coven ofWelsh Traditional Witches led by Ed Buczynski, who became his lover. They opened the Warlock Shop inBrooklynHeights. The shop became a focal point for the various occult/wicca groups in New York City.

Herman also put out a magazine, Earth Religion News, and hosted a local weekly cable television show. Herman is given credit for effecting a truce in 1975 between the various New York occult groups that had been been putting curses on each other. He persuaded them to meet in the back room of The Warlock Shop.

In 1976 Herman and Ed renamed their shop Magickal Childe and moved it to Manhattan. In 1977, he was one of the facilitators of the publication of The Necronomicon by Simon(generally taken to be a pseudonym for Peter Levenda).

Herman edited three books of Pagan Rituals, and two Magikal Formulary Spellbooks.

28 April 2008

Keith was raised in Wembley, London. He was a failure at school, except for music. He left at 15. He was the drummer with The Escorts, and then The Beachcombers, and joined The Who in 1964. He was married to a woman from 1966 to 1973.

He was noted for playing fast and loud, and one occasion he literally exploded one of the drums as a climax. He became famous for his destructions of hotel rooms and friends’ rooms. He destroyed plumbing by dropping fireworks down toilets. He drove a car into a swimming pool in Flint, Michigan – some say that it was a $50,000 Rolls-Royce, but there has been controversy about exactly which brand of car it was. In 1970, he ran over and killed a friend while escaping from hostile skinheads.

A heterosexual drag queen, his favourite drag was as the Queen. As Dougal Butler, his personal assistant puts it, Moonie 'frequently takes it into his head to act the ginger beer, especially if he can get hold of a dress or two'.

In the movies he portrayed a groupie who dressed as a nun in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, 1971, wicked Uncle Ernie in Tommy, 1975, and a dress designer given to sampling the product in Mae West's Sextet, 1978. The tabloid press relished tales of Moon on the road with a pal referred to as Barry the Poof and his transvestite boyfriend.

He died from an overdose of Clomethiazole (Heminevrin), a medication taken as part of a programme to wean him off alcohol. He died in the same apartment that Mama Cass Elliot had died in four years earlier. He was 32.

Dougal Butler with Chris Trengove and Peter Lawrence. Full Moon: The Amazing Rock and Roll Life of the Late Keith Moon. William Morrow and Company. 1981: 113.

27 April 2008

Victor identifies as both lesbian and transgender. He was beaten by his father for behaving like a boy. His family requested that he stop using the name ‘Mukasa’ because it embarrasses the dead father. In church he was stripped naked and his clothes and shoes burnt to ‘kill the male spirit’.

He has been evicted and fired from his job several times because he is either lesbian or transgender. In 2002 started speaking out on radio and in the press. In 2005 his house was raided and documents taken. He is chairperson of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG). When he spoke on a radio program, the station was fined heavily. His house was raided by the police in 2005.

He is sued the Ugandan Government. He fled to South Africa for nearly a year to get some relief.
In 2008 he joined the staff of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
Finally after more than three years, a court ruling in December 2008 that the raid had violated the plaintifs rights to privacy and awarded them 13 million shillings ($6,700). The Minister of Ethic and Integrity announced that the Governmant would not appeal, but that the laws against homosexuality were clearly inadequate.

A native of Germany, Becker was teased about his high voice and accused of being a cross-dressed woman. Taking the hint Becker became Emma and migrated to the United States. For many years Emma was cook to Theodore Roosevelt, US President 1901-9.

In September 1904 she drank to the point of unconsciousness in a bar and was taken to a police station where an investigation revealed that she was male-bodied. She was sentenced to four months in jail.

Magnus Hirschfeld translated from the German by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress Prometheus Books. 1991: 322.

The nuns charged the abbess with keeping a man dressed as female and pretending that he was a woman. It was common knowledge, they claimed, that he 'was most plainly of the male sex, and that this person regularly served the abbess'.

An investigation did find this man. He justified himself in that he was unable to do man's work. As for the abbess, he lived forty miles away and had never met her. A physician came forward and explained that the male nun, even as a boy, had a disease of the groin. On the instructions of Radegunde herself (who had founded the convent), he had castrated the boy to cure him. As far as he knew, the present abbess was ignorant of the issue.

Unlike the many tales of female transvestites who lived as men in monasteries and were later canonized, it was assumed that there is only one reason for a man to impersonate a nun, and that is to have sex with the other nuns. Radegunde (who was later made a saint) had founded the convent after escaping from an enforced marriage with the Frankish king Chlotar I. The convent possessed a relic of the true cross, and the little finger of the right hand of the Cappadocian martyr, St. Mamas of Caesarea. Radegunde had a close friendship with the poet Venantius Fortunatus, who acted as her chaplain.

Radegunde is the patron saint of Jesus College Cambridge, which was founded on the site of the twelfth-century nunnery of Saint Mary and Saint Radegund.

23 April 2008

Chinese name: Aisin Gioro Xianyu, with the courtesy name Dongzhen (= Eastern Jewel).
She also had another Chinese name: Jin Bihui.

She was the thirteenth child of Shanqi, the tenth Prince Su, an impoverish rake of royal descent who was briefly the Manchu ruler of Inner Mongolia as a Japanese puppet.

Su gave his daughter, at the age of eight, to Kawashima Naniwa, the Japanese military advisor, who raised her as his own daughter. She was sent to school in Tokyo for an education that included judo and fencing.

Su died in 1921. His concubine, who had no official identity, committed the traditional suicide. Yoshiko lost interest in all things Chinese. As a teenage girl, she was raped by Kawashima's father, and had an affair with Kawashima himself. She also had many other lovers, both male and female. She did honour her father’s arrangements and marry a Mongol prince in 1921, but she fled him after four months and claimed that the marriage was unconsummated.

She alternated between a bohemian life in Tokyo or Beijing and being kept by a series of rich lovers. In 1928 she used her royal blood to get invited into the Forbidden City and became a friend of the empress, who regarded her as the liberated woman she longed to be.

Joining the Japanese colony in Shanghai, Yoshiko started to wear men's clothing, particularly riding breeches and shiny black boots. She would bind her breasts with a silk scarf. She found a fellow boot-fetishist in Ryukichi Tanaka, head of Japanese Intelligence in Shanghai, and they acted out various sexual scenarios together.

Tanaka put her on the Intelligence payroll. She played a major role in persuading the last Chinese emperor, Pu Yi, to become the puppet ruler of Manchuria. She participated in the Japanese occupation of China, and extorted large sums of money from Chinese merchants who were accused of dealing with the Chinese forces. She continued her habit of taking many lovers, both male and female.

By the end of the war in 1945 she had gained much weight and had contracted syphilis. She was betrayed, by a spurned lover, to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. They found her, as Jin Bihui, guilty of treason and beheaded her.

Deresty Morton, a New Zealander, moved to the United States in 1904. In 1906 she became Peter Stratford.

During the Great War, he worked with US government medical forces in New York. He later worked at a variety of jobs from heavy manual labor to literary criticism. He employed Beth Rowland, a minor Hollywood screen writer, as a secretary, and after a friendship of two years, they married. He soon left her to go to the west coast in an attempt to help his tuberculosis, and she followed. After his death she claimed that it took her four years to realize that he was not really a man, and when she did so she moved out.

Peter was also exchanging emotional letters with Alma Thompson, another screen writer, who was a student of mysticism and wrote to Peter who was known as a Sufi. She also wrote with concern for his affliction.

He died of the tuberculosis in Oakland, California, and on his death-bed ‘admitted his sex’ to the doctors. His body was unclaimed by his wife.

22 April 2008

In February 1942 an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer in full uniform, with silver ribbons and decorations, together with an elegant young lady in an evening dress, were arrested in a box at the Hamburg opera, following a denunciation, in that the lady was a young man of 19, a soldier in the Waffen-SS, and home on leave in Hamburg. His father owned a major nightclub on the Reeperbahn.

They were taken directly to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, and locked in separate individual cells. They remained in solitary confinement until the camp was liberated in April 1945, other than an hour each night for exercise, but not at the same time. This was at the express command of SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler who did not want such a prominent officer mixing with other prisoners and wearing the pink triangle.

The lady, who was very pretty, 'even for a girl', was allowed to live only in that his father had important connections in the Nazi party, and paid a large bribe. Money from the father, plus the trade of the jewellery that he was wearing ensured that these two prisoners got extra food.

The SS intended to have them shot before the camp was liberated in 1945, but in the general chaos of that time they managed to escape.

20 April 2008

She was a jazz singer as Stormy Dale in the '40s, and the sole male impersonator in the Jewel Box

from Avery Willard - Female impersonation

Revue 1955-1969. After starting with the show he began to dress in men's clothing offstage also. However he pointed out that his voice and movements as a male impersonator were the same as when she was a big band singer in the 40s. He also makes a point of not being bothered about whether people address her as 'Sir' or 'Madame'.

He was photographed by Diane Arbus.

Stormé was present at the Stonewall riot, where he hit back at a cop who hit him at the start. Shortly afterwards his wife dies, and he quit at the Jewel Box Revue.

He was recognized as a transgender actor. In his 80s he worked as a bouncer at a Manhattan lesbian bar. He lived for many decades in the Chelsea Hotel in lower Manhattan.

SAGE Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 (given to recognize the accomplishments of LGBT seniors). Vice-president of the Stonewall Veterans' Association 1998 -2000. In the Imperial Queens & Kings of Greater New York, Stormé has won election many times the title of "Imperial King".

Stormé is ignored in Martin Duberman’s Stonewall, and on the Stonewall Wiki page and in the 1995 film. Stormé is also ignored in the otherwise comprehensive Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. 1992 by Linda Dahl.

James Lough p 164

In later years Stormé developed mental health problems. In 2009 the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged was appointed his legal guardian, and he was hospitalized as a woman. He was then almost always indoors until friends and gay and lesbian activists arranged with JASA to take him out now and then.

Elizabeth Drorbaugh. “Sliding Scales: Notes on Stormé DeLarverie and the Jewel Box Revue, the cross-dressed woman on the contemporary stage, and the invert”. In Lesley Feris (ed). Crossing the stage : controversies on cross-dressing. London & New York: Routledge. 1993.

Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 153.

19 April 2008

Born in Paris, but of an English father and a Spanish mother, Fernando adopted a male guise while still a child. He did national service in the French army.

At the age of 35 he migrated to Spain and joined the Madrid police force. He married a woman who already had a child, and afterwards claimed the child as his own. They moved to Seville, where still serving as a policeman he was employed at the governor’s palace. In this role he served under seven successive governors.

Two years after his wife died, he was badly injured in a street accident, and was taken to hospital where it was revealed that he had a female body. Consequently he was dismissed and denied his pension.

With Kristen Worley, Michelle Dumaresq and Alana Hardie, Canada is becoming known for its transgender sportspersons. But the grandmother of them all is Michelle Duff who won the Belgian Motorcycle Grand Prix in 1964 before the others were even born.
____________________

Michael Alan Duff was born in Toronto. He was a competitive motorcycle racer 1955-69, mainly on the European Grand Prix circuits.

In 1963 he married a Finnish woman and had a son with her the same year, and daughter two years

later. In 1964-5, he rode under contract for Yahama. He won the Belgian Grand Prix 1964 at a record average speed. In 1965 he broke his pelvis and left hip joint during testing and was six months in hospital.

In 1967 he stopped professional racing, separated from his wife, and moved to California to become an associate editor of Cycle World. He still did some racing, and in 1969 won the Eastern Canadian Championship. From 1970-8 he ran a Yamaha dealership. He also remarried and had another son. From 1978-84 he worked doing specialized machine-shop work in the Greater Toronto area.

In 1984 Michael became Michelle and commenced transition. She separated from her wife, moved to down-town Toronto to start living as a woman, and became involved with the transsexual group FACT-Toronto. She completed transitioned in 1987: surgeon Michel Seghers in Brussels.

She published her autobiography in 1999, and in 2000 moved to an isolated cottage in central Ontario. She is also a photographer and writer of children’s fiction. In 2009 she published two young-adult titles about animals.

18 April 2008

Lou Reed was a Jewish artist born in Brooklyn, and raised in Freeport, Long Island, New York. In his teens he was compelled to have electroconvulsive treatment for homosexual behavior. He sang with and wrote for the seminal underground rock band, The Velvet Underground 1965-1973, and later was a solo performer.

Reed recorded songs about transpersons, some rather questionable: ; ‘Sister Ray’, 1968, said by some to be inspired by Sylvia Ray Rivera (even though the lyrics don't match what is known of her life), and ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’, 1968 (about a renegade doctor and death on the operating table); ‘Candy Says’, 1969, about Candy Darling; ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, 1972, with vignettes about Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis.

His lover in the mid-1970s was a trans woman known to the public only as Rachel, who was half Mexican native. She was a regular at Max's, Kansas City and at the 82 Club.

Lou described Rachel in an interview with Bambi magazine:

"It was in a late night club in Greenwich Village. I’d
been up for days as usual and everything was at that super-real, glowing
stage. I walked in there and there was this amazing person, this
incredible head, kind of vibrating out of it all. Rachel was wearing
this amazing make-up and dress and was obviously in a different world to
anyone else in the place. Eventually I spoke and she came home with me.
I rapped for hours and hours, while Rachel just sat there looking at me
saying nothing. At the time I was living with a girl, a crazy blonde
lady and I kind of wanted us all three to live together but somehow it
was too heavy for her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out.
Rachel was completely disinterested in who I was and what I did. Nothing
could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all
that much when he did.

Rachel knows how to do it for me. No one else ever did before. Rachel’s something else.”

Rachel appears on the inner sleeve of Sally Can’t Dance,1974, and the title track of Coney Island Babe, 1976 is dedicated to her. The cover of Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed, 1977 is of photographs of the two of them. The title track of Street Hassle, 1978 is about her.

Reed completely refused to talk about her after 1978, when he decided to go straight.

There is a rumor that Rachel died in the early 1990s.

Lou died in 2013, aged 71, from liver failure.

Marc Campbell comments:

"I think Rachel deserves some recognition. She inspired some of Reed’s
best songwriting and managed to keep him steady at a low-point in his
life. History can do better than to kick her to the curb."

Who is that knocking
Who's knocking on my chamber door
Could it be the police
They come and take me for a ride
I haven't got the time-time
She's, ah baby, sucking on my ding-dong
she's sucking on my ding-dong
Oh, just like Sister Ray said

Lady Godiva's Operation

Life has made her that much bolder now
That she [has] found out how.
Dressed in silk, latin lace and envy,
Pride and joy of the latest penny-fare,
Pretty passing care.
Hair today now dipped in the water,
Making love to every poor daughter's son,
Isn't it fun?
Now today, propping grace with envy,
Lady Godiva peers to see if anyone's there
And hasn't a care.
"Doctor is coming," the nurse thinks SWEETLY,
Turning on the machines that NEATLY PUMP AIR.
The body lies bare.
Shaved and hairless, what once was SCREAMING,
Now lies silent and ALMOST SLEEPING.
The rain must have gone away.
STRAPPED SECURELY TO THE WHITE TABLE,
ETHER CAUSES THE BODY TO WITHER AND WRITHE,
Underneath the white light.
THE DOCTOR ARRIVES WITH A KNIFE AND BAGGAGE
SEES THE GROWTH, JUST SO MUCH CABBAGE
That must now be cut away.
NOW COMES THE MOMENT OF GREAT, GREAT DECISION.
THE DOCTOR IS MAKING HIS FIRST INCISION.
One goes here,
AND ONE GOES THERE.
"The ether tube's leaking," says someone who's sloppy.
THE PATIENT, IT SEEMS, IS NOT SO WELL SLEEPING.
The screams echo off the walls.
Don't panic -- someone give him pentathol instantly.
The doctor removes his blade cagily slow from the brain.
BY MY COUNT OF TEN.
THE HEAD WON'T MOVE!

Candy Says

Candy says, I've come to hate my body
And all that it requires in this world

Candy says, I'd like to know completely
What all they discretely talk about

I'm gonna watch the blue birds fly
over my shoulder
I'm gonna watch them pass me by
maybe when I'm older
What do you think I'd see
if I could walk away from me

Candy says, I hate the quiet places
That cause the smallest taste of what will be

Holly came from miami f.l.a.
Hitch-hiked her way across the u.s.a.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her leg and then he was a she
She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side

Candy came from out on the island
In the backroom she was everybodys darling
But she never lost her head
Even when she was given head

She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the coloured girls go
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo ... etc

Little joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New york city is the place where they said
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
I said hey joe, take a walk on the wild side
...
Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was james dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would have helped that dash
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
I said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side
And the coloured girls say ...

Coney Island Babe

But remember the princess who lived on the hill
Who loved you even though she knew you was wrong
And right now she just might come shining through

Daly has a B.A from The College of Saint Rose, an M.A. from The Catholic University of America, a Ph.D. in religion from St Mary’s College, Indiana, and PhDs in sacred theology and philosophy from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (no US Catholic university would permit a woman to do this last degree in the 1960s).

She was hired at Boston College in 1967, and would have been terminated after one year following publication of her book The Church and the Second Sex, which was critical of the Catholic Church. However demonstrations by the then all-male student body resulted in her getting tenure instead.

In the late 1970s Daly was the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond (whose dissertation became The Transsexual Empire, 1979), and it is rumoured that they were lovers. At the same time she was writing Gyn/Ecology, and both books quote the other.

Daly describes Jesus as: 'androcracy's Absolute Androgyne ... male femininity incarnate'. This is as part of a rejection of male Christianity. On androgyny she writes: 'Experience proved that this word, which we now recognize as expressing pseudowholeness in its combination of distorted gender descriptions, failed and betrayed our thought.' 'Androgyny is a vacuous term which not only fails to represent the richness of be-ing. It also functions as a vacuum that sucks its spellbound victims into itself.'

On transsexualism she parallels Raymond, using words like mutilation, and compares sex reassignment to African clitorectomy. She dismisses female-to-males as tokens and regards male-to-females as non-women in that they cannot menstruate, lack clitorises, cannot give birth, require continual hormone fixes, and are without female history.

She popularized the claim that 9,000,000 people perished in the witch crazes of early modern Europe, a number that has no basis in research. She has also been criticized for ignoring the experiences of non-white women.

In later years Daly refused to admit male students to some of her classes at Boston College on the pretense that their presence would inhibit discussion. The College reprimanded her in that her discrimination was in violation of US law and the College’s own non-discrimination policies. In 1998 two male students, backed by a conservative advocacy group, sued the college on this issue, and she was further reprimanded. She absented herself rather than admit the male students, and the College removed her tenure. She attempted to sue for violation of tenure but her injunction was denied. This became a de-facto retirement.

16 April 2008

Wladimiro Guadagno was born in Foggia, Apulia. As Vladimir Luxuria she became an actress, television personality and politician, and, for a short time, a prostitute.

She organized gay events, and was director of the Circolo di cultura omosessuale Mario Mieli in 1993. She was a major person in organizing Italy’s first gay pride festival in 1994.

She was elected to Parliament as the Communist Refoundation member for Lazio 1 2006-8. It was of Luxuria that Alessandra Mussolini said that it was "better to be a fascist than a faggot (meglio fascista che frocio)”. She was the first transgender member of any parliament in Europe. Early in her time in Parliament, Forza Italia MP Elisabetta Gardini made a fuss about Luxuria using the women’s toilets, but it was Gardini who was criticized for her prejudice.

Vladimir published her autobiography, Chi ha paura della Muccassasina? in 2007, and her first novel, Eldorado, 2013, about an Italian travesti working in the Berlin nightclub of that name at the time of the Nazi takeover.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.